Red Wings goalie Jimmy Howard stops this shot by the Ducks' Bobby Ryan during the first period Wednesday in Anaheim, Calif. / Jeff Gross/Getty Images

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ANAHEIM, CALIF. — For much of the night in this critical Game 5, the Red Wings and the Ducks needed a case of Red Bull.

And Jimmy Howard needed a sedative.

Howard went high, low, knees, blocker, glove, shoulder, squat, jump, slide. He had more energy than the next five guys in red. He did everything humanly possible to keep his team alive. “He’s been tremendous. He is tremendous,” said Anaheim’s Bruce Boudreau. And he coaches the OTHER guys! Howard saved 31 shots in 33 regulation chances Wednesday night — and many were impossible shots caused by weak play or bad defense by his teammates.

Until finally, less than two minutes gone in overtime, a puck went across the Wings’ crease, untouched by Detroit’s Joakim Andersson, and the Ducks’ Nick Bonino had a free shot.

He took it.

And Howard needed an aspirin.

Final score: Ducks 3, Wings 2. Anaheim leads the first-round series, three games to two, and can close it out Friday night at the Joe. You can’t be surprised. It was an awkward game, sloppy hockey at times, too many missed pucks, half-whiffs, intercepted passes and giveaways. With neither team able to sustain good effort, it seemed destined to go to overtime. It did.

And it did not end well for Detroit.

Nor did it start well.

“I thought in the first period, we watched,” coach Mike Babcock said. That’s OK if you bought a ticket. Not if you wear skates. No knock on Southern California, but whatever the Wings did during the day Wednesday, they should never do it again.

The game began around 7:15 p.m. local time and the Wings already looked as if they had been up all night, tepid, tentative and slow. Meanwhile, the Ducks were a machine gun: five shots on goal in just over the first two minutes. They were all over Howard. In fact, they were so all over him, they tended to fall on top of him, which, luckily for Detroit, is still a no-no in hockey. Anaheim was tagged for goalie interference, survived that penalty, and did it again moments later, with Corey Perry clomping on Howard as if he were gum on his skates.

That time cost the Ducks. On the power play, Johan Franzen fired a puck off Anaheim’s Sheldon Souray, got a perfect ricochet and tucked it past Jonas Hiller. So the Wings — being outshot, outhustled and outplayed had a 1-0 lead.

Hockey right?

“They were better than us in the first,” Henrik Zetterberg would admit to the media, “and we still had a lead.”

But you can’t count on that kind of luck. Eventually, you play badly, you’ll pay badly. Howard was out of his mind on every close shot — he stopped pucks in mid-air, in mid-chest, from point-blank range —but when the short shots aren’t working, you try a long-shot.

And the Ducks hit a long-shot, all right. Kyle Palmieri had the puck about 50 feet away from the goal, turned and whipped it blind.

Howard never saw it.

A 1-1 tie.

Hockey, right?

“We were not ready when the puck dropped,” defenseman Jonathan Ericsson admitted to Fox Sports Detroit during the break. “We’re second on the pucks too many times.”

When there’s only two teams out there, being “second on the puck” is not good.

And so it went ...

But OK. The middle period saw the Wings wake up — and make up. They had six shots (four on goal) in the first four minutes, several takeaways as well. They so outplayed Anaheim, Boudreau called a time-out 4:17 in. You can go through a decade of hockey games and never see a time-out at 4:17 of the second period!

In time, the Wings’ effort paid off. A good dig by Pavel Datsyuk led to a Zetterberg shot off Hiller that could not have rebounded any more perfectly if an astrophysicist designed it. Mikael Samuelsson took that puck in perfect flying stride and whipped it top shelf for a 2-1 lead, his first goal of an injury-plagued year.

At that point, midway through the game, you got the sense that if the Wings put one more past Hiller, this was over. For whatever reason, the Ducks’ pilot light kept going out. They had no sustained effort. At one point, the Wings’ third line of Damien Brunner, Gustav Nyquist and Andersson held the Ducks hostage on a shift that seemed to last forever.

But hockey is a game of burying chances, not just getting them, and the Wings blew the former after achieving the latter when a major boarding penalty was called on Daniel Winnik at 14:15 of the second period. That gave the Wings five minutes of power play. One goal, and this series might be very different right now.

“No question you like to score one on the power play,” Babcock told reporters. Instead, the Wings managed one shot. One shot? Yes, they also hit a post. Still. One shot?

There is not much Howard can do about that. And not much he could do in the final minute of the period, when, with the Ducks now on a power play, Ryan Getzlaf came skating down behind a line of players with way too much time for a guy with his talent. He lined up a shot and fired it past Howard.

The game was tied, 2-2.

It would stay that way through the third. And after facing one last hard shot in the closing seconds of regulation, Howard skated off, the Wings toweled off, and for the third time in five games, we were in overtime.

Just what two exhausted teams wanted.

And then it ended ...

“I thought they were way better than us in the first, we were way better than them in the second, I thought the third was even,” Babcock said.

Which brings us to the overtime, and the winning shot, less than two minutes in, a great play by defenseman Ben Lovejoy, who made a terrific move in the corner, deked Brian Lashoff out of his skates, came free, and slid the puck across the crease. Howard might have screamed, “HEY, SOMEBODY KNOCK IT AWAY!” But the only Red Wings somebody in sight was Andersson, who, for some reason never touched it, and watched it go right to Bonino’s stick.

All that was left was to close your eyes.

Game over. Ducks go crazy. And the ugly truth is now before us: The shortened season could end very shortly, Friday night at Joe Louis Arena. The Wings in Game 6 get home ice and Justin Abdelkader back. Both should help. But this is a grind, and if both teams looked this tired with a 2,000-mile airplane trip in their bloodstream, what will they look like Friday with another (or, for that matter, Sunday with a third)? The Wings will be very happy to say good-bye to these insane Western Conference road trips next season.

But right now, they’d be happier to say good-bye to the Ducks. It’ll take two victories to do it. Mostly it’ll take Howard being as great as he was Wednesday night — and his teammates getting a lot closer to his effort, and a lot further from theirs.